On pedants, anthills, and mines

I caused great offence to a dear friend in my last blog, which has horrified me and cast a slight (very slight) shadow over my holiday in the Hunter Valley. I called him pedantic, which I thought was a complimentary acknowledgement of careful attention to important detail, but I have discovered he does not see it the same way AT ALL. Mortified at the thought of having caused anything other than mild amusement in my blogging, I typed "definition pedantic" into the Google search engine and reeled at the results, which I had not anticipated. There isn't a single contemporary definition of pedantic that I could find that isn't pejorative. I stumbled over an older definition that is neutral, but could find no modern definition that is even faintly complimentary. I was wrong to use this word in my last blog and I freely admit it. If anyone is a pedant, it is clearly me - and I'm a flawed one at that!

While on the subject of (ped)ants, I encountered my very first ant-hill yesterday. It is quite extraordinary; the ants are easily 15 mm long and very fast. The track they have made from their ant-hill to the nearest eucalypt is not much narrower than a sheep track, and a good 20 metres long. We saw how they climb up the trunk and shimmy out to the very ends of the branches to gather something delicious - nectar? - to take back to the mound. No time off on weekends, either, methinks.

Steps up to Baiame Cave

Today we left Peppers Guest House and drove off for a daytrip in search of new excitements in the Hunter Valley. We drove into a pretty valley at the edge of the Yengo National Park and clambered up a few thoughtfully placed steps to a sheltered cave with wonderful views and cave drawings created by aboriginal people living in another world; a time when there were no bovines, no equines, no vines, no wines, and certainly no mines in the Hunter Valley.



This figure is thought to represent the creator
who taught the ancestors survival techniques
before returning to the sky from Mt Yengo

 

In our travels today we also saw the Hunter Valley number one mine, which is vast: conveyors, massive trucks, huge piles of coal, huge holes in the ground. From our viewing point on the Lemington Road (which is home to roo corpses innumerable), we could also see the enormous steam stacks of the two neighbouring power stations. As my big camera had run out of battery (grrr) I didn't bother trying to take phone photos of the mine, but here's a snap of some suitably whopping tyres being transported out for repair.

After our industrial encounter we diverted via Jerry's Plains and Denman to the Two Rivers vineyard. I can only presume the woman there took against us; she recommended lunch at the pub at Gundy, for reasons we can only guess at... the Gundy pub has the classy name of "Linga Longa" and serves the greasiest F and Cs this side of the black stump. I have to say though, that most of the locals around here are welcoming, helpful, and fun.

On the way home we popped in for a "structured" wine tasting at the Scarborough vineyard, and now we are back in the sanctuary of our room at the nicest guest house in Oz, drinking Venus Block chardonnay from the Pepper Tree vineyard that we visited yesterday. Oh happy day! I'm not sure I can contemplate a return to the normal every-day...

This pub is surrounded by horse studs. They are doing their best to suggest that Phar Lap was a local.

There's nothing wrong with "me"

We learnt about hypercorrection at varsity, and boy have I heard some funny examples since I left that hallowed café! I've probably been guilty of a few meself. According to Wikipedia, "Hypercorrection in linguistics is a usage of some rule of pronunciation or grammatical prescription that many users of a language consider incorrect, but that the speaker or writer uses through misunderstanding of these rules, often combined with a desire to seem formal or educated."

I'm not sure if the following are true examples of hypercorrection, but I've always assumed that the speakers were operating on the "more is better" principle - with extra final dental plosives for good measure:

"It's a hard road to hoe." Hell yes - I reckon! Even if not tarmacadammed.

"Her midrift was adorned with a piercing!" Would you have minded, if her tummy weren't drifting so much? Or do you mean there was a rift 'twixt trousers and top?

This is all jolly good fun, and I'm not so rude that I jot these down when I hear them, so you'll have to make do with two eee gees, while I wrack my brains to remember some more for your reading pleasure... or - why don't you share some of your own in the comments yonder!

The real purpose of this posting, however, is to report from the front about my experience of the current use of the first person singular nominative, "I". In my view, "I" is pushing out "me" for all the wrong reasons. I accept language change. Every English speaker demonstrates language change with every sentence uttered or typed (do you really use that new-fangled spelling of "English"?). And I'm happy to accept hypercorrection as a bona fide cause of natural language change because we're social animals, not slavish rule-followers - but it seems so deeply ironic that people who are in other ways linguistically conservative have completely reversed a rule that until recently was traditional standard English.

There's definitely a trend I'm noticing, in which speakers and writers carefully avoid the first person accusative pronoun "me". "Please send the final version to John and I". Whaaaaat? "Between you and I, we will work it out." Pardon?

I find it so difficult not to snap (or type) "Me!" back - but I know I mustn't - Dale Carnegie would not approve, I'm sure. Now, the demographic of the offenders is (sorry gents; I do hope you don't recognise yourselves - drum roll please):

Gender: Male
Profession: MD
Nationality: English
Age: 50 +
Predisposition: conservative and pedantic

Would you believe this?

In attempting to understand this, I hereby theorise that as children a-growing, we have all been hectored not to say "Me and Jeremy are going down to the Hunts' for a swim". Come on - you can all hear your mother/father/aunty saying in reproving tones: "Jeremy and I" - can't you?? And I contend that as a result, many of us have chosen to hypercorrect ourselves: to use "me" is to venture into dangerous territory - much safer to do a find-and-replace with "I"!

But in fact it's not even that simple - maybe "I" isn't safe either, so let's use neither and say "My wife and myself are delighted to accept your invitation to swim at the Hunts'"!

What do you think? Just between we?

Earth-shattering Thoughts?

Some people think the earth under Christchurch is angry.

I was thinking of this on the way to work this morning, and suddenly had a different perspective on it.

What if, ya know, the earth under Christchurch is sick? What if she has projectile vomiting - you know - the sort where even if you know it's coming, you can't stop the event or the force of it? Maybe she's mortified by her lack of control. Perhaps she's trying to suppress the little burps and the big farts but she can't stop what's determined to come out! Every time there's a big scary one she's wanting to apologise - but she can't!

Market Highs

I toddled off to the market outside Riccarton House on Saturday - for the first time since the February quake, I think. The House is covered in scaffolding but it's still there, large as life (at least, it was on Saturday, before yesterday's wobbles). It was a June morning so not tropical, but not beastly cold either. I have learnt to go on my own, as I can relax (no-one beside me looking bored) and concentrate on my choices (no-one trying to chit-chat).

Oh joy! Two firsts for the Riccarton Market (quakes aren't all bad!) the cheesemonger had his truck there - I bought a whopping lump of English Stilton. Oh bliss! The Volcano Cafe (recently demolished in Lyttelton) had a stand with all the old favourites - huge succulent olives, artichokes in lemon and garlic, mushroom and port pate, tapenades, stuffed bell peppers, and more. I'm pretty sure it was Liz Braggins manning the stand - but I was too shy to suggest that she sing. Would have been cool though. I did establish that they still have the stand at the Lyttelton Market, so no need to feel guilty about pinching them.

I left - delightfully weighted down by a marvellous sense of well-being, two fully-laden bags, and an empty wallet.

Font Memories

Once upon a time, quite a long time ago, when I was completing a BA Hons majoring in Linguistics, I had a computer with two 8 inch floppy drives and a dot-matrix printer. To my lasting regret, I didn't keep the hardware and I don't even have a photo of my semi-trusty System 402.

I do, however, still have hard copies of the essays I wrote. Lord, how the International Phonetic Alphabet challenged me and my dot-matrix printer! When typing my essays, I left loads of gaps and entered all the "funny characters" and difficult lexically-phonological equations in careful ink.

I understood this, once.

Twenty-two years later I have most of the world's knowledge available via my phone, my tablet, my laptop, and my PC. But I'm still quite tempted by the inking option, when it comes to funny /kærıktɘrz/.

Parenthetically, I have a learned brother who has almost certainly been a master in this arcane area of knowledge for several decades - but if there's one thing I've discovered recently, it's that if you can't ask the right question, the answer, however correct, will be inapplicable at best and incomprehensible at worst.

Anyway anyway, unlike the 80s, these days I'm generally using neither WordStar nor WordMaster nor WordPerfect to write (remember them, anyone?). Most of what I write is in the single-source database tool Author-it - and it's there that things get a little complicated. Marvellous as it is to be able to reuse info frantically AND publish to several formats - Word, web, etc. (without having to be an XML guru, brother dear), I have to admit that special characters have taken years off my life - because you think you've got the character Right when you're writing, but then when you publish your content into web format, it's a question mark or a little box or something equally Wrong. And so then you have a look at the output in another browser and it's Right - or it's still Wrong but Differently.

One of the things I've inferred from my recent reading is that we English speakers, ironically enough, have been so cushioned in our funny character experiences that we don't know what we don't know. Lots of funny characters we've entered over the years have worked - but only thanks to special rules written to cater to our ignorance. Thanks Microsoft, for trying to make things easier for English speakers - you've fudged things so that some characters appear correctly in your programs even if we've mucked things up under the bonnet... which would be truly fantastic if writers could control which browser users use...

Meanwhile, most of the world's population uses funny characters every day, and long ago came to grips with the intricacies of writing and publishing in Arabic/French/Hindi and the like. But I did have to laugh when I read this article on Wikipedia and some of the cited characters were little boxes. It made me feel - well - not alone.

Anyhoo, after numerous set-backs (eureka moments followed by unexpected and entirely unwanted results), I think I have attained a useful (albeit low) level of understanding. BabelMap has become more sensible to me, and less strange. I (sort of) understand blocks. I'm publishing Author-it content and it's Right - even on the iPad!

Author-it users: if you comment on this blog entry (without ridiculing my slowness), I might even tell you what I've learnt...

Book-Book remains at large

So, at the beginning of February 2011, Ian repurposed a loop of aluminium with handle (a P.G. Harding-designed whitebait scoop-net), quite a number of clothes pegs, and my strawberry protection netting, and made a trap to catch Book-Book.

First, he caught George.

Then he rigged it so that a piece of string extending to the kitchen window hook was all that stood between Book-Book and captivity.

Witness the little bowl of tempting grain.
Witness the cage that would transport her to Dunsandel.

You will simply have to take my word for the scissors that remained on the kitchen window-sill for 4 weeks, waiting for the opportunity to CHOP the string and capture the hole-digging, tomato-stripping, lettuce-thieving wee beastie.

Day after day I arose early, confident of capturing her. She took to roosting in the bush yonder (above and to the left of the clothes-line) and several times I was up before her. Chickens do apparently lie in.

On the very hot day of which I have written previously, she was in the target zone at 6.30 am while I, in my dressing-gown, was in the kitchen making hot drinks. Fearful of fatally loosening the one "dressing-gown cord that ruled it all" in full view of the neighbours, I instead whisked through with great speed and care to the bedroom to summon my collaborator, but by the time he was sufficiently awake to grasp the urgency and jump into clothes, Book-Book had pecked her way out of the target zone.

That was sadly our last chance for weeks. Whether she recognised the great danger, or whether the grain became less tempting, or whether I just wasn't in the right place at the right time, I cannot say.

All I do know is that by the time she was next seen in the target zone, the Earthquake had happened, the window was shut, and when I frantically cut the string it jammed in the window frame long enough for her to jump sideways out of danger.

I have seen her since but our relationship is, if possible, more fraught than before; I fear that she will not allow herself ever to be lovingly ensnared - let alone understand how much we admire her - pluck.

Christchurch, February 2011 - Sombreblog

I wrote this blog in mid-February but didn't post it because I wasn't absolutely sure of my facts about broken sewers being used. I'm going to post it now for its blistering irony. The quake we had since I wrote this had a much worse effect on both the city and the eastern and southern suburbs. I haven't visited the east since writing this but I've seen the telly and I've talked to people who live there. Many of the places we cycled through that day are now off-limits again, and many of the buildings which had "sort-of" survived the September quake are now flattened. Sombreblog indeed. The only reason I have time to post this today is that the latest aftershock killed our servers and I can't work.

On Waitangi Day, Ian and I arose early and went for a bike ride. We do it every now and then, whether we need to or not. The day was forecast to be a scorcher - at 8:30 it was already very warm - so it was a case of do it early or die. We treddlied into Joe's Garage in town, circumnavigating the earthquake fencing in Beckenham, Sydenham, and Manchester Streets. Joe's Garage is on the corner of Hereford and Liverpool Streets, just along from the hole that was Manchester Courts. Now the ancient skyrise is a vacant lot, apart from some very strong looking steel back stairs and a few remaining piles of antique bricks.

After a swift but ample brekkie surrounded by Tonka toys, we set off again across Latimer Square towards the fire station on Kilmore Street, then diverted along into the Avon Loop. We then proceeded to follow the Avon all the way to Brighton, as it meandered through Avonside, Dallington, and Wainoni. Although this is our second expedition of this sort to the eastern 'burbs since the big earthquake, 5 months on it is even more shocking, really, to see portaloos still on the streets and sewer pumps still operating along the river. The roads have mostly been repaired, but you clearly see where fissures have crossed the road and done untold damage to the neighbouring houses. The damage is sometimes subtle - all looks well, except that the angle of the whole dwelling is very slightly wrong. Often it's the garden that gives it away - weeds and long grass grow where once people lived.

I couldn't take pictures - it would have been offensive. You expats will just have to try to imagine.

Five months on, and still there are many roads with signs saying "Residents Only".

Five months on, and people are moving back into their damaged homes because they know they will run out of money later on if they don't.

Five months on, and the council is sending people letters telling them they will be fined if they don't mow their lawns.

Five months on, and people are using the broken sewers, because wouldn't you? rather than send your children to the nearest portaloo on the street at midnight?

It's unspeakably tremendous that no-one was killed, but the damage was massive and costly. The rowing club still has fissures in the carpark that are so wide I couldn't cross them without dismounting. Without pictures, I find it difficult to describe Porritt Park, which we biked across, taking the greatest care to find safe ways across the great cracks. The grass has been replaced, about 50/50, with the finest sand. The artificial hockey fields which we visited so often with George and his mates now look like badly made beds. I can only presume that the land under the houses has done much the same thing - it's just a lot more visible in the open spaces.

Postscript: By the time we were on the home straight to Brighton it was very, very hot. The promised beer at the pier drew me like a magnet and I biked faster and faster the closer I got. Indescribable joy to drink beer and then go down to the seaside and paddle while we waited for George to come and pick us up. We were home by midday, feeling virtuous; the mercury hit 36 in the afternoon and at midnight on Sunday it was still 27 degrees. Cor, blimey!